SURPRISE! Vancouver Housing Starts up in February. Who Cares?
According to CMHC Vancouver housing starts were up over 100% last month compared to February 2007. This is good news for the newspapers, but what does this tell us that we didn't already know? Not much. The Vancouver market is healthy? Inventory is up, but prices are still strong. The fact that a number of developers started construction last month is great. The developers obviously still have a confidence in the Vancouver real estate market. I bet next month the starts will be down. And real estate is too local for the numbers to tell us anything about the local real estate market. I suppose they may be a good economic indicator.
The numbers were dominated my multi-family starts. In the City of Vancouver there were 65 single-family starts compared to only 10 last year and 708 multi-family starts compared to 47 last year. In the CMHC literature "Vancouver" refers to Metro Vancouver and the city is Vancouver City. The news release is attached and you can can find the national housing starts announcement here.
Matthew Collinge: Vancouver REALTOR® with Royal LePage Westside
